Winter is the season of celebration. Blankets of white snow and hot chocolate kisses create a glimmering foundation for your everlasting love story. If you’re planning a wedding in the brisk December, January, and February months, consider these romantic winter wedding ideas for your special day.
Winter Wedding Themes
Winter brings unmatched inspiration — glistening snow, warm fireplace lighting, and snow-covered evergreen, all of which you can integrate into your wedding theme. For your winter wedding, consider these three seasonal themes that capture wintry love.
‘Tis the Season
Winter brings plenty of holiday festivities. As both of your families gather for holiday celebrations, make your wedding the starting point for new traditions by choosing a holiday theme.
Embrace the season’s greetings by including on-themed decorations and fun.
- Plaid accessories, like scarves or table place settings.
- Plenty of greenery, accompanied by festive cinnamon sticks and berries.
- A show-stopping holiday tree for guests to place wedding gifts under.
- Golden reindeer prancing around the wedding venue.
- Centerpieces that overflow with baubles and ornaments.
- Apple cider or seasonal wine tastings.
You have full control of your ideal color scheme and decor. Fully embrace the holiday season by emphasizing red, green, and gold, or merely take inspiration and opt for an all-black wedding with colorful plaid details.
Winter Wonderland
Nothing compares to a picturesque snow-covered landscape. If you live somewhere that gets lots of snow, take advantage of the scenery and add cool-toned decor to your wedding venue to accentuate nature’s beauty. Or, if you’re in a warmer climate, take inspiration from colder locales and transform your venue into a personalized, romantic winter wonderland.
In your venue, consider adding these winter wonderland-inspired decorations:
- If it’s snowy outside, book a venue with large windows to let in the natural winter aesthetic.
- In addition to wooden accents, integrate frosted branches, pinecones, and berries to add to the frostbitten appearance.
- Opt for cool-toned lighting.
- Add a touch of icy accents, like icicles or glass chandeliers, to evoke feelings of coolness and freshness.
Typically, the winter wonderland theme relies on cool tones such as icy blue, crisp white, and metallic silver. This motif also lends itself to decoration, so making a mood board and collaborating with a professional wedding planner will come in handy.
Let Love Glow
On the opposite side of the spectrum, the Let Love Glow wedding theme embraces the loving warmth of the winter season — lighting your way to a long, happy marriage. As the name suggests, this theme embraces all things lighting, especially romantic candles. For this motif, opt for a warm-toned color scheme with complementary lighting.
4 Unique Winter Wedding Color Schemes
Once you’ve picked your theme, the next step is to consider your winter wedding colors.
Start by choosing one color you adore. This hue will be your focal color, which will play a central role in aspects like your bridesmaids’ and groomsmen’s attire. Once you have your focal color picked out, choose two to three colors that match it, sticking with either warm or cool tones.
For your winter wedding, think about these inspirational color schemes.
1. White, Ivory and Taupe
Many happy couples gravitate toward winter weddings for their crisp, fresh and modern feel. Nothing evokes these feelings better than a clean color scheme with white, ivory, and taupe colors.
You can play around with various cool and warm tones to best accompany your wedding venue and personal style. Choose one as the focal color, and use the other two as accents throughout your centerpieces, bouquet, bridesmaids’ dresses, etc.
2. Rose Gold, Ivory and Copper
Rose gold is a luxurious, textured gold with soft rose undertones and has grown in popularity since the early 2010s because of its beauty. Wedding planners often use color schemes that amplify rose gold’s beauty, such as ivory and copper accent colors.
Copper has textured, warm tones that bring out rose gold’s underlying red color. And, balancing these colors, ivory offers a pleasing contrast without sacrificing the other two shades’ beauty.
3. Black, Champagne and Red Wine
Current wedding trends embrace nontraditional color schemes, including all-black weddings with small hints of color, like champagne and red wine. An all-black winter wedding is uniquely beautiful because of black’s stark contrast with white snow, and is sure to lend your venue elegance with the right decor.
4. Navy, Evergreen and White
Another popular color trend is pops of bright, fun colors, like navy blue and evergreen. For your winter wedding, evergreen will highlight any greenery both inside and outside your wedding venue.
The perfect complement to evergreen is the equally luxurious navy blue. You can highlight this color duo with a white accent. What’s more, this color combination works great in plaid patterns, a winter staple.
In-Bloom Winter Wedding Flowers
Wedding flowers elicit different emotions and meanings. Typically, wedding planners integrate in-bloom flowers and greenery to match your wedding’s season. Not too many flowers bloom during the winter but consider incorporating these seasonal and meaningful flowers into your ceremony.
Rose
Roses are an enduringly popular wedding flower choice because they symbolize love. Roses bloom in various colors — including red, pink and white — that suggest meanings like romance, joy and innocence, respectively.
Did you know that the number of roses portrays different messages, too? For your wedding, consider including nine roses in your bouquet, which symbolizes eternal love. And, for your center displays, consider adding two roses, representing profound, passionate love.
Gardenia
Gardenias have lush, layered petals similar to roses. Originally from Asia, gardenias have a luxurious appeal and an eye-catching green stem and leaves. In white varieties, the gardenia symbolizes purity, hope, and protection, making them ideal for wedding bouquets and arrangements.
Star of Bethlehem
Characteristics of the Star of Bethlehem flower include its long stem and six pure-white petals, arranged in a star shape. This flower is biblically symbolic, named after Jesus’ birthplace, and radiates meanings of purity, hope, and happiness.
Waxflower
Waxflower is a common filler flower, noted for its plentiful blooms and rustic greenery. Waxflower comes in various colors, including pink, purple, blush, and white tones. They’re popular in wedding arrangements because of their romantic symbolism of happiness in marriage.
Limonium
Limonium is a filler flower that adds beautiful texture to any bouquet or arrangement, often evoking thoughts of a fairytale meadow dreamscape. Interestingly, the name Limonium derives from an ancient Greek word meaning “meadow.”
Aside from its technical meaning, Limonium has earned the nickname “everlasting flower,” noted for its beauty long after the blooms have died. For this reason, Limonium signifies remembrance.
Wintry Accents for Your Flower Arrangements
In partnership with your winter florals, these seasonal accents offer hints of detail that add texture and personality to any centerpiece or bouquet.
- Cotton branches: Cotton branches might not be the first thing you think of when considering wedding arrangements, but they’re growing in popularity for winter weddings because of their beautiful white blooms and cotton texture.
- Eucalyptus: Eucalyptus is well-known for its pale green color and asymmetrical appearance. You can find eucalyptus in various forms, such as white berry and silver dollar.
- Berries: Berries come in a range of colors, but for your winter wedding bouquet and other flower arrangements, we recommend gravitating toward the traditional red berries, as well as white ones.
- Pinecones: Pine trees are often the first type of tree people think of when daydreaming about frosted winter sceneries. Pinecones offer texture, dimension and depth to arrangements while adding to the wintry feel.
Talk to your florists and mention the types of winter wedding flowers and accents that will best match your wedding theme. Florists are impressively talented at coming up with unique ideas!
5 Ideas for Your Winter Wedding Centerpieces
Using these winter flowers and accents, start thinking about different centerpiece styles for your wedding. Centerpieces add dimension to your wedding venue, where you can play around with each accent’s width and height to maximize your venue space.
Take inspiration from these five winter wedding table decoration ideas for your wedding.
1. Log Pieces and Greenery
Tap into Mother Nature’s beauty with two of her most breathtaking features — rustic log pieces and the luscious greenery that accompanies them. You can find log pieces in all kinds of shapes, sizes and types. But, for wedding centerpiece arrangements, it’s best to stick with rounded log slices or miniature wooden logs, like candle holders.
Different types of trees have distinct qualities and aesthetics, which may influence your decision on which log type you want to feature in your wedding. For example, white birch or aspen wood types will look great in winter wonderland themes, while black cherry or rustic oak slices are optimal for warmer-toned themes.
As for greenery, almost any type will accent your wood of choice. Maximize your winter wedding aesthetic by incorporating silver dollar eucalyptus, dusty miller, Christmas holly, pine, cedar or juniper greenery.
Incorporate log pieces and greenery by stacking log pieces and accenting them with your preferred greenery type, and consider adding other decorative elements like candles, cranberries or frosted branches.
2. Candlelit, Frosted Branches
Add some height to your wedding venue with candlelit frosted branches. Frost looks best with lighter tree bark, like white birch or quaking aspen trees. These barks have a natural snowy appearance, and you can maximize the frosted effect by spray-painting any foliage or bark white — a growing trend in wedding arrangements!
Place these frosted branches on your event table in evenly spaced distributions. Surrounding each frosted tree, place a sea of romantic electric candles of varying heights to elevate the frosted branch’s magical appearance for an eyecatching winter wedding centerpiece.
3. Blooming Silver Vases
A reliable way to add elegance to your wedding is with beautiful vases. Vases come in all shapes, sizes and finishes, but we recommend metallic silver vases with intricate details for a winter wedding. Depending on your style, you may consider vintage finishes, too.
A growing wedding trend is to mismatch different decor to create a cohesive design. Imagine the amount of texture you can build by grouping and layering variously sized, shaped and textured vases — blooming with contrasting flowers, like roses and gardenias, or cotton branches for an added vintage feel.
4. Ornament-Filled Vases
Vases typically hold flowers and candles, but who said that’s all they can glorify? Ornaments radiate the joys of the holiday season and coincide with seasonal-themed weddings.
This centerpiece idea works well with crystal or glass vases, filled with eye-catching ornaments that match your color scheme. And, to amplify its elegance, surround the vase with candles, where the baubles will capture and reflect the candles’ soft glow.
5. Evergreen Lanterns
Lanterns are powerful lighting tools, radiating the coziness of winter and the romantic glow of candlelight. You can find lanterns in different styles, but the most popular wedding decorative lanterns are metal and wood-trimmed finishes. They’re naturally beautiful, and you can magnify the lantern’s aesthetic by surrounding it with evergreen or eucalyptus greenery, adding to your wedding’s decor.
Winter Wedding Favors Ideas and Inspiration
Perhaps the best thing about weddings is the feeling of togetherness and being able to celebrate love with the people closest to you. For your guests, consider these meaningful winter wedding favors ideas to thank them for celebrating with you.
1. Hot Chocolate Kits
One of the few things sweeter than love is hot chocolate. When your guests go home, give them the warmth that resembles the feelings of love with a hot chocolate kit.
- Homemade hot chocolate mix: Place homemade hot chocolate mix in a decorative pouch. Along with your pouch, include a brief list of instructions on how your guest can make and serve their cup of love.
- Hot chocolate spoons: A hot chocolate spoon is as it sounds — a spoon covered with hardened chocolate. Guests can use it to stir their hot chocolate for even more indulgence.
- Custom mugs: To complete your hot chocolate kit, add a custom mug designed to represent your big day!
Set up your hot chocolate kit by placing the homemade hot chocolate pouch and hot chocolate spoon decoratively inside your custom mug.
2. Cozy Boxes
The winter season is the time to relax and get comfortable. With this in mind, gift your guests a box full of cozy items, such as blankets, hand warmers and sweet treats. Once they get home, they’ll appreciate your favors and being able to indulge in total warmth and relaxation!
3. Warm Drink Mixes
In companion with cozy boxes, warm drinks are sure to make your guests feel festive and appreciated. Popular drink mixes include non-alcoholic mulled wine and apple cider, but if your guests drink alcohol, you may also consider favoring cocktail kits like hot buttered rum and apple pie whiskey.
Find Your Perfect Winter Wedding Dress at Alexandra’s Boutique
For your winter wedding, you’re going to want a wedding dress that will keep you warm and feeling beautiful. At Alexandra’s Boutique, we have all the current and timeless styles, customized to complement your figure and unique style. Schedule an appointment with one of our specialists, and we’ll help you find the perfect gown for your winter wedding!